The World Wide Web (the “web”) provides a popular source of information for consumers and business users. Surfing the web has become appealing to both sophisticated and casual users. The web browser has therefore become the primary means of accessing data over the Internet. However, one of the major problems is that the user must go out and search for data. If there are 20 web sites a user is interested in, the user must look at each site to see if there have been any interesting changes since the user's last visit. Even then, if additional content is added to the site after the visit, the user will not find out until the user returns to the site again.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustration of a typical browser configuration in the prior art. In the illustration in FIG. 1, a user typically, accesses web sites 120-150 via web browser 110. In FIG. 1, the user can access web site 120-150 by accessing each individual web site to access the data the user desires. When the content at each web site is updated, the user has no way of automatically knowing the change in content until the user revisits the site.
This poses a problem for several classes of web sites. If a site is infrequently updated, the user will need to visit the site many fruitless times until the user actually notices a change. In practice, the user is unlikely to keep checking the site, and may miss changes that occur in the site.
If the site is frequently updated, for example a news site, the user may need to visit the site very often to see the most recent content. This will become unmanageable if there are many sites that the user is interested in, since the user will spend a great deal of time going from site to site.
Many sites are updated frequently, but the updates may be unimportant to the user. For instance, a banner advertisement may change frequently, or a date stamp on the page may change every day, or even every visit, but the actual content of the page may not have changed. These types of pages are a problem for simplistic systems for finding modified pages.
Thus, if a user is interested in multiple, changing sites, the user will either need to spend a great deal of time repeatedly visiting a web site, or the user will fail to see the current information he/she wants.
Several prior art solutions have been provided. The first is a list of book-marked web pages of interest. The user can request the browser to determine if any of the book-marked pages have changed since the last visit. This is useful for rarely-modified pages, but does not, however, help with pages that change often, or pages that have irrelevant changes. This solution also requires that the user provide a specific list of pages.
Another solution is for the web site to provide an email signup, which will send an email message whenever there is a relevant change on the web page. For instance, a page rarely updated can send out an email whenever there is a change or a news page can send out an email whenever there is breaking news. The main disadvantage of this solution is that it must be implemented by the web site providing the pages, so the user is helped only on the relatively small set of sites that implement this solution. Additionally, the notification proposed by this solution is under the control of the web site, not the user, so the user cannot fine-tune the notification. Finally, notification is through email, so the user needs to read their email and then switch to a web browser to access the page.
Another solution is “channels,” as implemented in Internet Explorer. This allows the user to subscribe to a web site as a “channel.” The content of the web page is periodically accessed and optionally downloaded to the user's computer. A particular channel can be selected for viewing by clicking on the “channel bar.” The contents of the web page can also be constantly displayed in a separate window or a screen saver. This solution permits constant display of frequently updated data, but is unwieldy for more than a few channels, since each channel is displayed separately. In addition, when the contents of a channel change, the browser cannot distinguish between relevant and irrelevant changes.
Another prior art solution is a “start page,” which is a web page provided by a company that summarizes current information. Examples of this are used by Yahoo and Excite. These pages allow a user to personalize the page with selected news, stocks, weather, sports, etc. This type of site solves part of the problem by combining multiple types of current information in a single place. These sites, however, have the disadvantage that the information provided is under the control of the site and is limited to a small set of content providers. For instance, they may get news from one or a few sources. If the user wants to see summarized news from a different source, the “start page” solution will not provide it.
Another solution combines content providers that provide summarized information with a viewer that displays the desired summaries. The content may be provided through different “channels,” and the user can select the desired channels of content. An example of this is “Headline Viewer” available by http://www.vertexdev.com/HeadlineViewer/. The disadvantage of this approach is that it can only handle content that has been specially processed by a content provider, thereby limiting the types of data that can be tracked.
Thus, for the prior art user to view content from multiple web sites, the user needs to painstakingly and manually access specific content from each web site to retrieve the content desired.